the last such email came from eileen, and contained a link to the first recipe that i had seen actually call the baked good behemoth a "picaken." what was so different about this email that made me suddenly entertain the idea of following through on this stupid, stupid quest?
the subject line said "challenge."
(unfortunately), i am not a girl who backs away from a challenge easily, which is why three days and several sticks of butter later this happened:
but i digress.
the first person to whom i made my intentions known was my little sister alex, who immediately asked "what is with you baking things inside of other things?" i wish i knew, alex.
so last saturday, after extensive googling of pie flavors and cake flavors and polling really everyone about potential combinations thereof, i assembled the ingredients and equipment and cara and i began picaken-ing. you may be wondering how exactly one accomplishes such a feat. lucky for you, i have pictures.
first you bake a pie. i had never done this before, so it was an experience in itself.
we made a nectarine filling (which, if you think about it, is totally ludicrous considering it was january in chicago. on second thought, not that ludicrous in comparison to the whole rest of the experience).
then you bake the pie. bonus points if you do it in a pi dish.
if you live in a big city and can't cool your pie on a windowsill (like in tom sawyer or dennis the menace or whatever) you open your bedroom window to let in the frigid january air instead. this was surprisingly effective.
this is the point where normally you would stop. after all, you've just baked a beautiful pie. or, you could remove the pie from its dish and set it in a springform pan...
and pour yellow cake batter over it.
where did it go?
it comes out of the oven looking like this. voila! picaken.
you could also stop at this point. picaken accomplished, after all.
cara and i did not stop at this point. what we did instead was assemble another pie, this one banana. we baked it, we window-silled it, and we popped it right out of its dish.
...flipping a perfect, fresh baked pie out of its dish is something of a harrowing experience.
we put it in the springform pan,
and covered it with batter. this time, lemon cake.
we piled our two picakens onto a makeshift cake stand (an upside down cast iron skillet covered in aluminum foil) and frosted that bad boy.
then we invited as many people over as we could so that they could help us eat the thing.
after the first slice came out, i may have cried a little on the inside. the inside of our picaken was far from beautiful. the banana pie turned purple - google offers little guidance as to why this happened, except that it has "something to do with potassium." it also maybe didn't hold together as well as it could have, as demonstrated by the "slice" i am holding below.
despite its less than winning looks, the picaken was delicious.
.JPG)
i won't tell you how long the whole experience took, because frankly i am a bit ashamed to admit how long we spent on it. was it worth it? absolutely - picaken challenge accepted, and totally dominated. next person who emails me a recipe is getting this photo of a double-picaken slice in response. done and done.
i would like to say that i've learned my lesson about ridiculous food assembly (and my reluctance to back down from a challenge) but picaken-squared was totally worth the time, effort, and mess. that said, i'm never ever going to do it again. probably. we'll see.
yep. barbecue.
we costumed up and headed to the theater. i channeled 
unfortunately my hair shrank considerably on the way to the theater and i shattered my teacup in the parking lot while climbing out of the trunk of aleck's car. nevertheless, i enjoyed the movie and the people behind me enjoyed a view unobstructed by my less enormous hair.
somewhat comatose i took two trains, an airplane, and a shuttle to westwood village, was intercepted by my sister, and eventually made my way to laguna, where i deliriously participated in a few rounds of flipcup, sliced my thumb open while removing a turkey's spine and ribcage, and promptly passed out at 9pm. i woke up after an hour or so and rallied for the rest of the night, but man did it feel good to finally get to sleep.
as i attempted to drain the fat off, however, i lost control of the situation and pitched bess onto the newly cleaned and sterilized counter.
i set her aside for awhile because frankly i was a little tired of her (two hours of deboning will do that) and focused on a duck stock made from the bones and some duck fat french fries to munch on.
unfortunately i was overeager and snatched one straight from the pan, dripping hot duck fat down my shirt and giving myself a duck fat blister (which is, two days later, decidedly more disgusting looking albeit less painful than shown below).
worth it.
i stuffed bess with a goat cheese/apricot/soyrizo (sue me, trader joe's didn't have the real stuff) mixture and (shoddily) trussed her, and into the oven she went.
she looked delicious upon emerging, but by that point i had been eating for several hours and the last thing i wanted to do was eat a duck.
